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Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Soaking it in

Dear readers, I apologize for missing my Friday post. Instead of posting I was staring at brushstrokes...brushstrokes from the likes of Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso. My husband treated me to a visit to our local Kimbell Museum. Their current exhibit is "The Mirror and the Mask - Portraiture in the Age of Picasso". For someone like me, who can never get enough portraits, it is like a dream come true. (The fact that some friends kept the boys for the night made it even more incredibly unreal and wonderful!)

The website doesn't show much, but it is a great exhibit. There was an interesting range of work...impressionist, cubist, way-funked-out modern, rather nicer modern and some realist. The exhibit talked about both artists using the mirror literally and that portraits are as much about the artist as the sitter. The exhibit also talked about how many artists fell in love with African tribal masks and how that influenced many pieces and they also mentioned that historically portraits were about how the sitter wanted to be perceived, their mask of choice.

My husband's favorite piece was a cubist one, a man and his books...he liked the statement it was making about the man and his books and felt it was a good use of cubism...it was saying more than just a portrait of a man in front of a bookshelf.

I liked Cezanne's Man in a Blue Smock. I liked the intensity and depth of the paint in the face versus the sketchy, thinly painted background. Fortunately it is part of the Kimbell's collection, so I'll see it again!